the one time my kids actually get a sleepover

My cherubs don't often get to have a sleepover. We have a no sleepover rule in our home. As we live so far away from family there really are not that many local opportunities for them to stay away from us overnight.

So it is always exciting when we are with family because they get to sleep over and hang out with other family members and especially cousins. We are lucky that each of my children have cousins around the same age and they pair off together and have a blast playing and having fun.

My kids absolutley love it. Matt and I love it as well. I love that my children feel confident enough to spend the night away from us and at the same time I have peace of mind that my children know how to speak up if they feel uncomfortable.

It is a long way to drive to give our kids such an experience but the memories we create are worth the sacrifice and effort to make them happen. We generally jam pack our trips back to Adelaide with as many family catch up and sleepover nights as we can. It is a crazy sleepless routine but our kids thrive on it!

So not looking forward to the trip home!

the paddock where it all began

While we are here in Adelaide on holiday, we decided to take our children on a little family history drive.

We took them out to the paddock where it all began. The special paddock where Matt asked me to marry him. Yes, my husband asked me to marry him in a paddock. Amongst the cow patties and cows.

Very unique but there is a little story behind how it all happened and why it ended up being a paddock.

 

I was at Matt's house one day and we were both doing Uni study and out of the blue Matt announces we are going for a drive. So we jump in his car and off we went. I had no idea what was about to happen.

Matt had this thought that he should ask me to marry him. So he acted on it immediately. I mean immediately! He stood up right away and went to a place he knew wasn't too far away.

He wasn't thinking about cows when he proposed to me. He was thinking about the view and a special place that had meaning to him. The two pictures above are the view on either side of the exact spot where he got down on one knee and asked me to marry him.

One view is of the beach and coast line and the other is of the countryside.
Two great loves in our lives...the ocean and the country.

Of course back then it was a lot greener and lusher and looked very different. The kids were kind of like....ummmm...alright...so romantic Dad! Then he mentioned that he didn't even have a ring and I looked around at the dry grass and sparse trees and announced to everyone....well...I must have really loved your DAD!! Ha ha!

Especially seeing as we had only dated for 4 weeks when he took me up to this spot and asked me to marry him. You can read a little more about that here: Our Love story.

Adelaide has the biggest Cream Donuts in Australia

One thing you might not know about Adelaide is that they have huge donuts. We have lived in many different states in Australia and nowhere else have we found such epic donuts to eat. They are so huge that I decided they need a blog post of their own!

As a family this is the first time we have ever purchased donuts of this size for our children and after eating them it is going to be the last! Oh my word! They were so huge that nobody could finish them!

Let's not even mention how much sugar are in these...once in a lifetime people...once in a lifetime!!

 We were speechless how massive they were and the layering of fresh cream and jam was amazing!

 

Synchroised donut eating! Anyway, I thought these pictures were fun and colourful and I wanted to remember how huge these donuts were so that we never, ever buy these again!

Thanks Adelaide for your awesome bakeries and the fun memory of the family donut pig out! I am not going to mention where we got these because you will seriously feel sick after eating them :)

Indoor family climb at Urban Climb

A review blog post for Urban Climb.

We are always looking for great family fun activities to do together on the weekend or during the school holidays. One awesome family activity that we loved and you might like to try is taking an indoor family climb session at Urban Climb here in Brisbane.

When we arrived we received a training session about the safety issues of indoor climbing and geared up with our harness and climbing shoes. The staff were really friendly and helped us feel comfortable and excited about taking on this new adventure as a family. I think I was the only one who was a little nervous. All of my kids were pumped to take on those walls!

At Urban Climb they have over 60 top ropes and over 250 different routes from beginner levels to the really tough stuff for hardcore climbers. Urban Climb is a hive of indoor climbing activity! As we were all what I would call 'beginners' we started off on an easy wall and teamed up to help each other out to have some climbing fun.

The sport of climbing is mostly done in a pair. Whilst you are up on the wall monkeying around and having fun there will always be someone on the ground holding the rope and keeping you safe. This person is called the ‘belayer’ and plays a very important role for the climbers safety.

I hooked myself in as a belayer and never really left. My kids climbed and climbed and climbed. One after the other would come and hook themselves in and climb where I was standing. We had children all over the place taking on all sorts of difficult climbs.

My children would watch the serious climbers for a minute and then take on the wall themselves. They quickly picked up that the different coloured rocks represented different skill levels and it was wonderful to watch them learning a new skill and physically pushing themselves to reach new heights.

As a parent watching my children climb up so high in the air it was comforting (for once!) to know that they were safe and attached to ropes if they fell. We had a wonderful day out climbing at Urban Climb.

This would be a great date night activity as well and I have to add that if you are single...you might want to give indoor climbing a go! A great way to meet new friends and very fit looking guys! If you are interested in giving indoor climbing a go yourself, you can read more about prices and available times HERE.

Have you ever been indoor climbing as a family?

the all night drive to Adelaide

Well, here we are in Adelaide on our spontaneous holiday. After packing our bags, loading up a trailer and all jumping in our bus, we drove from Brisbane to Adelaide without a stop over.

We left on Saturday at 2:30pm and arrived in Adelaide on Sunday at 7pm. It was a long, long exhausting drive but we made it safely.

Matt and I took turns driving and it was one long boring night as we just kept on going and going and swapping and swapping the driving until we reached our destination.

The kids were brilliant and kept encouraging us to keep moving so that we could get to Adelaide to see family. I will never forget when I took over the driving at 2am and every single child was awake in the back of the bus encouraging me to keep driving and saying things like 'you can do it mum, you are awesome mum'.

We all spent a very uncomfortable night snatching moments of sleep in our bus without technology (more on this another time) and without a stereo that works (our stereo decided to die just before our trip and I now have a permanent twitch in my eye!) and we survived! Just.

We spent a lot of time talking, reading and singing on our trip over. I do have to share that I did like the Lego song 'Everything is Awesome' until I had to listen to it sung over and over again in rounds by seven children.

I of course have now have my own version of the song, 'Everything is NOT Awesome' that may have been featured a little on our trip over as well!

Anyway, the long night was worth it to see our cherubs so excited to see family again and amazingly there has not been any complaints about what they had to endure to make this spontaneous holiday happen.

So here we are in Radelaide catching up with family and chilling out. So worth the trip and so worth the small budget we made it happen on!